If I write an article using the comparison "this is like the Pope saying 'I don't believe in god'" - only Slashdot would get "The pope don't believe in god" out of this:)
So, you are saying slashdot is just like all of talk radio in America?
Just out of curiosity... Are ther any consumer rights organizations in the US? Any half-decent consumer org should be up in arms about this.
Ask an american to name a consumer-advocacy group and chances are they will say, "The Better Business Bureau." But our society is so 0wn3d by business interests that even the BBB is just a front for a bunch of businesses - the BBB is 100% funded by membership fees and only businesses are allowed to join, the conflict of interest there could not be clearer and it shows in the way the resolve "difficult" complaints (basically delete them from their files after 6 months, if the business at fault is, or becomes, a dues-paying member).
We do have some legit groups, like Consumer's Union, but they've got a conflict of interest in cases like this because they publish "Consumer Reports" using the same "economics of scarcity" business model that the MPAA and RIAA are desperately trying to impose on the net.
Not that following the video game makes much difference. One of the best "video game" movies was "Super Mario Brothers" and it had fuck all to do with Doom too.
And before the inevitable, "Super Mario Brothers SUCKED yew lam3r!" Let me just say, its not the video game, and its not really all that much of a kids movie, but it is definitely cooly psychedelic and a cult classic.
For example, in any situation that deals with classified data, once classified the disks can never, ever be unclassified without physical destruction. Part of the reason is that data recovery technology is VERY good, a few years ago, state of the art was the ability to recover data that had been overwritten up to 20 times.
In a nutshell, it worked by looking at the "edges" of the data tracks, because of the minute variations in head positioning, each time the drive wrote out data, the write head was not perfectly centered so there would be enough "splash" on the sides of the track to be able to recover the information. And that was a few years ago, who knows how good the tools are today.
Another thing to watch out for with all of these software solutions - you can only over-write what you can access. If the disk has acquired new bad sectors during its use, the controller automagically copies the data to a spare sector and then puts the bad sector on the "grown defect list." Generally, through software, you can't get to the sectors on the grown defect list - the controller has them remapped to the new sectors But, someone with the right tools can usually read those sectors well enough to extract the data from them.
Do you care about that level of security? I don't know, but you should at least be aware of fragility of most solutions proposed here so far.
As I recall, you're better off using a string of alternating 1s and 0s, followed by a string of 0s and 1s, like so: 10101010 followed by 01010101. This maximises the ``change'' you're making on each pass, and so it messes up the traces of the old information the fastest.
Actually, it doesn't. At least one reason is that RLL you mentioned, modern drives use RLL (run-length limited) encoding internally. One effect of using RLL is that the bits actually written to the disk are different from the bits being stored, because they are encoded. Thus a 10101010... pattern and a 01010101... pattern aren't necessarily exact inversions of each other.
There are certain patterns that are more stressfull for a disk to record (i.e. more error prone) I do not know the physics behind them so I can't give a real example, but here's a made up one that sounds good - if the data you write out results in all 1's and the neighboring track has all 0's then the 1's might bleed over into the 0's and vice-versa.
FWIW, there are somewhat similar issues with on-the-wire encoding for networking, look up 8b10 encoding for an example of an encoding method designed to reduce them.
According to every stat I've seen Americans are some of the hardest working people on earth.
It's more like most-working rather than hardest-working. If you compare productivity on an hourly basis, the EU is on par with America. They just take month-long summer vacations and have a lot more time off during the rest of the year. I think the numbers were around ~70% of the hours worked and ~68% of the producitivity per capita of the USA.
We do have a lot more stuff and bigger houses than the people on the EU do though.
I haven't seen a comparison with the 3rd and 2nd world countries.
From the article: "Robots with weapons mounted on their frames are each expected to be able to observe from 2 and 1 kilometers during the day and night, respectively, and will have the capability to record voices and take pictures in a 180-degree circle."
Oh good, name calling. Who's the 2 year old again?
It ain't name calling if it is the truth.
But, getting to the point, it's more efficent. I could spend 2 hours washing and waxing my car, or 15 min at the local car wash
If it takes you 2 hours to make a PB&J then you've got a major disability.
Tell me, oh authority of taste (licker of knives) and well of infinite knowledge (./ reader), what you find so redeeming about this 'crust'? It's the burnt part of the bread!
a) It is not burnt, if it were burnt it would be carbonized b) It's kind of like peeling an apple. There's nothing particularly redeeming about it, just not worth the effort of avoiding - something a person so focused on efficiency would have figured out long ago.
Quite simply, it's cool. It puts a little something unusual into people's lives... makes an otherwise boring, same-old-same-old, day for these counter clerks into something to remember... at least for a few hours.
Absolutely. My mother-in-law runs the till at their family gas-station-convenience store. She saves every $2 bill she gets all year long and gives them to the various kids in the family as birthday presents.
Chances are a lot of the cashiers will do the same - well at least the part about saving the $2 bills and not returning them as change to other customers.
With the bills being marked with a pen (which would change color if the bills were fake), she should have trusted the pen,
Absolutely. Getting your hands on the linen (I think that is the right material) that US dollars are printed on is hard (expensive), my guess is that it costs close to, or more than, $2 per bill to acquire. Similarly, bleaching a bunch of $1 bills just to reprint them as counterfeit twos is also likely to have a total cost of more than $2 per bill.
Thus, the iodine pen test should have been enough right there for any sane person, including the arresting officers, if not the BBY employees (who, it must be admitted, do have a reputation for poor reasoning skills), to conclude that the bills were not counterfeit.
I get the feeling reading the article that he was being an ass in a way that made the cops feel safer with him restrained.
And I get the feeling from reading the article that the cashier & manager made up the bit about smudged ink afterwards to try to cover their asses. After all, the bills did pass the iodine pen test.
The printed account doesn't say either way on either point, so your guess is as good as mine.
a less-than-brilliant sales associate and a dim-witted manager type whose reaction to actually having to think or acknowledge something beyond his limited experience is to retreat into an officious, unchallengable "I'm the boss, and whatever I say goes" mode?
Anyone who has tried to take Best Buy up on their "price-match policy" will know that description fits the chain to a T.
It seems like a really stupid patent, until you try those sandwiches. They are GOOD. For someone who doesn't like to spend a lot of time cooking (or in the case of the PBJ, getting the components together), and also as a guy who never got over the whole crusts thing (hate them, cut them off, always), this thing is a godsend. Laugh all you like, but try one first.
Earth to lazy-ass, come in lazy-ass.
These things taste like ass, lazy, pre-processed ass
It takes about 90 seconds to put together a real PBJ sandwich and put the remaining components back into storage and lick the knife. To avoid eating crust (what are you 2 years old?) you tear the crust off one side and start eating there until you've eaten out everything but the remaining crust, which you then throw away!
This is a bet that someone will respond to another posting of mine with something along the lines of "but sadam had nothing to do with 9/11" to which I will respond with, "Hello, post had more than one joke in it." By posting this here, it is proof that I knew I was making two jokes at the time.
Excuse me, but how exactly does one equate suspected small-scale counterfeiting with hijacking airliners, flying them into buildings and killing thousands of people?
Because Sadam bought those terrorists their one-way tickets on 9/11 with counterfeit $2 bills. Don't you know anything?
Fortunately for my friend, a vacationing Washington State Trooper was in the bar and convinced the bartender to pay for the replacement card -and- cover my friend's party's tab for the evening.
Wow, and whoever said there's never a cop around when you need one?
Yeah right because acting like you'd happily give Linux a reach-around is much more appropriate.
Well, yeah it is.
Linux will gladly reciprocate, incorporating everything you've taught it and it is happy to teach you everything it knows too. While all the Bill will do for you is trick you into wearing a chastity belt.
So buying second hand cars is a threat to General Motors?
By God Yes!
It is bad enough that they don't get paid their due everytime the driver gets behind the wheel - they don't even get compensate for the use of their intellectual property by passengers!
When you buy a car, you buy the box it comes in and a license to drive. You don't really own the car, its just leased to you!
Ok then, let me say it this way, IBM has a consulting business, Sun does not. Nobody goes to sun and asks them to build a complete payroll system, IBM does it all the time.
Then there are even more areas, like the entire Rational division - Sun's got some compilers and some sort of primitive IDE, and Java. IBM's got a soup-to-nuts development environment from cross-platform compilers to the industry standard source-control system (ClearCase, I'm sure Sun uses it themselves) and all the other stuff around the edges like modelers(Rational Rose), debuggers(Purify), test harnesses, and top-notch Java.
Then there is systems management, IBM's got Tivoli, Sun's got what, Solstice? Solstice is far too basic to even be considered for most the places Tivoli is used.
Laptops. IBM sells them (not part of the spin-off to Lenovo) Sun does not.
Databases. IBM owns at least two real, multi-platform enterprise-class databases - DB2 and Informix. Sun does not.
Point-of-Sale systems. IBM makes them, turn-key. Sun doesn't.
Patents. IBM has the largest patent portfolio in the country and they've turned it into a very marketable and profitable commodity. Sun's got patents, but they don't use them to generate revenue, mostly just to have coin-of-the-realm to buy into cross-licensing agreements.
There's plenty more, I'm just tired of arguing with the blind.
Just for starters - IBM owns chip foundries, and IBM has a HUGE services division. Sun doesn't even try to make chips and there services division is like a feather compared to IBM's bowling ball.
Huh? Is that what happens when Sun implodes - you get BlackHolaris or something?
IBM and Sun match almost one-to-one in their product line-ups and target nearly the same customer base.
You must be blinded by the light, IBM is at least an order of magnitude bigger than Sun. They offer products and services in markets that Sun can barely scratch, much less match one-to-one.
Slashdot Mirror
If I write an article using the comparison "this is like the Pope saying 'I don't believe in god'" - only Slashdot would get "The pope don't believe in god" out of this :)
So, you are saying slashdot is just like all of talk radio in America?
Just out of curiosity... Are ther any consumer rights organizations in the US? Any half-decent consumer org should be up in arms about this.
Ask an american to name a consumer-advocacy group and chances are they will say, "The Better Business Bureau." But our society is so 0wn3d by business interests that even the BBB is just a front for a bunch of businesses - the BBB is 100% funded by membership fees and only businesses are allowed to join, the conflict of interest there could not be clearer and it shows in the way the resolve "difficult" complaints (basically delete them from their files after 6 months, if the business at fault is, or becomes, a dues-paying member).
We do have some legit groups, like Consumer's Union, but they've got a conflict of interest in cases like this because they publish "Consumer Reports" using the same "economics of scarcity" business model that the MPAA and RIAA are desperately trying to impose on the net.
Not that following the video game makes much difference. One of the best "video game" movies was "Super Mario Brothers" and it had fuck all to do with Doom too.
And before the inevitable, "Super Mario Brothers SUCKED yew lam3r!" Let me just say, its not the video game, and its not really all that much of a kids movie, but it is definitely cooly psychedelic and a cult classic.
So notice that full sized pies are not taxed but single servings are.
Why are you surprised by that? Don't you know that you can't have your pie and eat it too?
When you say "secure" I have to ask "how secure?"
For example, in any situation that deals with classified data, once classified the disks can never, ever be unclassified without physical destruction. Part of the reason is that data recovery technology is VERY good, a few years ago, state of the art was the ability to recover data that had been overwritten up to 20 times.
In a nutshell, it worked by looking at the "edges" of the data tracks, because of the minute variations in head positioning, each time the drive wrote out data, the write head was not perfectly centered so there would be enough "splash" on the sides of the track to be able to recover the information. And that was a few years ago, who knows how good the tools are today.
Another thing to watch out for with all of these software solutions - you can only over-write what you can access. If the disk has acquired new bad sectors during its use, the controller automagically copies the data to a spare sector and then puts the bad sector on the "grown defect list." Generally, through software, you can't get to the sectors on the grown defect list - the controller has them remapped to the new sectors But, someone with the right tools can usually read those sectors well enough to extract the data from them.
Do you care about that level of security? I don't know, but you should at least be aware of fragility of most solutions proposed here so far.
As I recall, you're better off using a string of alternating 1s and 0s, followed by a string of 0s and 1s, like so: 10101010 followed by 01010101. This maximises the ``change'' you're making on each pass, and so it messes up the traces of the old information the fastest.
Actually, it doesn't. At least one reason is that RLL you mentioned, modern drives use RLL (run-length limited) encoding internally. One effect of using RLL is that the bits actually written to the disk are different from the bits being stored, because they are encoded. Thus a 10101010... pattern and a 01010101... pattern aren't necessarily exact inversions of each other.
There are certain patterns that are more stressfull for a disk to record (i.e. more error prone) I do not know the physics behind them so I can't give a real example, but here's a made up one that sounds good - if the data you write out results in all 1's and the neighboring track has all 0's then the 1's might bleed over into the 0's and vice-versa.
FWIW, there are somewhat similar issues with on-the-wire encoding for networking, look up 8b10 encoding for an example of an encoding method designed to reduce them.
What do you expect for free?
You pay my going rate and I'll spend the time to dig it up.
Bite my wax tadpole!
According to every stat I've seen Americans are some of the hardest working people on earth.
It's more like most-working rather than hardest-working. If you compare productivity on an hourly basis, the EU is on par with America. They just take month-long summer vacations and have a lot more time off during the rest of the year. I think the numbers were around ~70% of the hours worked and ~68% of the producitivity per capita of the USA.
We do have a lot more stuff and bigger houses than the people on the EU do though.
I haven't seen a comparison with the 3rd and 2nd world countries.
From the article: "Robots with weapons mounted on their frames are each expected to be able to observe from 2 and 1 kilometers during the day and night, respectively, and will have the capability to record voices and take pictures in a 180-degree circle."
That's great and all, but if the robots can't also slip across the DMZ to play cards and drink beer with the other side then what good are they really?
Why would a humanoid squid have breasts?
Same reason humanoid vaginas smell like fish?
Oh good, name calling. Who's the 2 year old again?
It ain't name calling if it is the truth.
But, getting to the point, it's more efficent. I could spend 2 hours washing and waxing my car, or 15 min at the local car wash
If it takes you 2 hours to make a PB&J then you've got a major disability.
Tell me, oh authority of taste (licker of knives) and well of infinite knowledge (./ reader), what you find so redeeming about this 'crust'? It's the burnt part of the bread!
a) It is not burnt, if it were burnt it would be carbonized
b) It's kind of like peeling an apple. There's nothing particularly redeeming about it, just not worth the effort of avoiding - something a person so focused on efficiency would have figured out long ago.
Quite simply, it's cool. It puts a little something unusual into people's lives... makes an otherwise boring, same-old-same-old, day for these counter clerks into something to remember... at least for a few hours.
Absolutely. My mother-in-law runs the till at their family gas-station-convenience store. She saves every $2 bill she gets all year long and gives them to the various kids in the family as birthday presents.
Chances are a lot of the cashiers will do the same - well at least the part about saving the $2 bills and not returning them as change to other customers.
With the bills being marked with a pen (which would change color if the bills were fake), she should have trusted the pen,
Absolutely. Getting your hands on the linen (I think that is the right material) that US dollars are printed on is hard (expensive), my guess is that it costs close to, or more than, $2 per bill to acquire. Similarly, bleaching a bunch of $1 bills just to reprint them as counterfeit twos is also likely to have a total cost of more than $2 per bill.
Thus, the iodine pen test should have been enough right there for any sane person, including the arresting officers, if not the BBY employees (who, it must be admitted, do have a reputation for poor reasoning skills), to conclude that the bills were not counterfeit.
I get the feeling reading the article that he was being an ass in a way that made the cops feel safer with him restrained.
And I get the feeling from reading the article that the cashier & manager made up the bit about smudged ink afterwards to try to cover their asses. After all, the bills did pass the iodine pen test.
The printed account doesn't say either way on either point, so your guess is as good as mine.
a less-than-brilliant sales associate and a dim-witted manager type whose reaction to actually having to think or acknowledge something beyond his limited experience is to retreat into an officious, unchallengable "I'm the boss, and whatever I say goes" mode?
Anyone who has tried to take Best Buy up on their "price-match policy" will know that description fits the chain to a T.
It seems like a really stupid patent, until you try those sandwiches. They are GOOD. For someone who doesn't like to spend a lot of time cooking (or in the case of the PBJ, getting the components together), and also as a guy who never got over the whole crusts thing (hate them, cut them off, always), this thing is a godsend. Laugh all you like, but try one first.
Earth to lazy-ass, come in lazy-ass.
These things taste like ass, lazy, pre-processed ass
It takes about 90 seconds to put together a real PBJ sandwich and put the remaining components back into storage and lick the knife. To avoid eating crust (what are you 2 years old?) you tear the crust off one side and start eating there until you've eaten out everything but the remaining crust, which you then throw away!
This is a bet that someone will respond to another posting of mine with something along the lines of "but sadam had nothing to do with 9/11" to which I will respond with, "Hello, post had more than one joke in it." By posting this here, it is proof that I knew I was making two jokes at the time.
Excuse me, but how exactly does one equate suspected small-scale counterfeiting with hijacking airliners, flying them into buildings and killing thousands of people?
Because Sadam bought those terrorists their one-way tickets on 9/11 with counterfeit $2 bills.
Don't you know anything?
(yes, I am a plagarist, sosumi)
Fortunately for my friend, a vacationing Washington State Trooper was in the bar and convinced the bartender to pay for the replacement card -and- cover my friend's party's tab for the evening.
Wow, and whoever said there's never a cop around when you need one?
Yeah right because acting like you'd happily give Linux a reach-around is much more appropriate.
Well, yeah it is.
Linux will gladly reciprocate, incorporating everything you've taught it and it is happy to teach you everything it knows too.
While all the Bill will do for you is trick you into wearing a chastity belt.
So buying second hand cars is a threat to General Motors?
By God Yes!
It is bad enough that they don't get paid their due everytime the driver gets behind the wheel - they don't even get compensate for the use of their intellectual property by passengers!
When you buy a car, you buy the box it comes in and a license to drive. You don't really own the car, its just leased to you!
Again, I wasn't comparing sizes, only markets.
Ok then, let me say it this way, IBM has a consulting business, Sun does not. Nobody goes to sun and asks them to build a complete payroll system, IBM does it all the time.
Then there are even more areas, like the entire Rational division - Sun's got some compilers and some sort of primitive IDE, and Java. IBM's got a soup-to-nuts development environment from cross-platform compilers to the industry standard source-control system (ClearCase, I'm sure Sun uses it themselves) and all the other stuff around the edges like modelers(Rational Rose), debuggers(Purify), test harnesses, and top-notch Java.
Then there is systems management, IBM's got Tivoli, Sun's got what, Solstice? Solstice is far too basic to even be considered for most the places Tivoli is used.
Laptops. IBM sells them (not part of the spin-off to Lenovo) Sun does not.
Databases. IBM owns at least two real, multi-platform enterprise-class databases - DB2 and Informix. Sun does not.
Point-of-Sale systems. IBM makes them, turn-key. Sun doesn't.
Patents. IBM has the largest patent portfolio in the country and they've turned it into a very marketable and profitable commodity. Sun's got patents, but they don't use them to generate revenue, mostly just to have coin-of-the-realm to buy into cross-licensing agreements.
There's plenty more, I'm just tired of arguing with the blind.
Just for starters - IBM owns chip foundries, and IBM has a HUGE services division. Sun doesn't even try to make chips and there services division is like a feather compared to IBM's bowling ball.
massive UNIX license
Huh? Is that what happens when Sun implodes - you get BlackHolaris or something?
IBM and Sun match almost one-to-one in their product line-ups and target nearly the same customer base.
You must be blinded by the light, IBM is at least an order of magnitude bigger than Sun.
They offer products and services in markets that Sun can barely scratch, much less match one-to-one.